CASE STUDY
CENT 15 ARCHITECHTURE PROJECT- AVENUE
Building a house today is no longer simply about fulfilling a brief or achieving a certain level of energy performance.
Set on a long, narrow and densely wooded site in the Oise region in France, Avenue House is shaped by the qualities of its landscape.
Composed of three slightly offset volumes, the house opens each living space towards the surrounding scenery, creating multiple orientations and extending views through the trees.
The living spaces stretch from east to west while benefiting from southern light. Each volume accommodates a distinct moment of family life. Their relative autonomy organises the different uses of the house without isolating them, allowing each inhabitant to experience the home in a different way.
This sensitivity to place is reflected in the choice of materials. Timber and earth give the house both its physical presence and its atmosphere. Straw, although invisible once construction is complete, contributes significantly to the thermal performance of the building envelope. Together, these natural materials create an architecture whose qualities are as much sensory as they are constructive. From the earliest design sketches, the project was developed in close collaboration with the clients and the engineering team around a shared ambition: ensuring that comfort would first and foremost be generated by the architecture itself. Orientation, cross ventilation, solar protection, the quality of the building envelope and the thermal mass of the materials made it possible to design a house that requires neither air conditioning nor mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, while providing outstanding comfort throughout both summer and winter.
The construction of the house required the removal of part of the existing woodland. Rather than being discarded, the timber was retained and repurposed as fuel for a biomass boiler, while new planting now supports the continued growth of the garden. Rainwater is collected and reused for irrigating the landscape and supplying the sanitary facilities.
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